You've been toiling in your lab for months, years, or even decades, painstakingly inspecting and describing your corner of the biological world when one day a TV crew shows up outside your door, snickering over your choice of post-up cartoons. Do you (a) run screaming for the nearest bar, (b) drop your pipette and withdraw into semicatatonic silence, or (c) invite them in and open your lab notebooks?

In the best of all academic worlds, the right answer would be (d) call your public relations office and ask for advice. At larger institutions, these folks have a wealth of experience dealing with the media, and can provide services ranging from writing a press release or a lay summary to suggesting an appropriate on-air outfit. But in reality, PR offices are not all equally helpful, and besides, you're a scientist and uncomfortable asking for help.

So here, for your edification, is a cautionary tale, equally applicable to the Nobel-Prize-winner-in-waiting and the undergraduate wunderkind.

Elephant Sleuths Save the Day

A Johns Hopkins virologist named Gary Hayward has spent most of his career studying the molecular makeup and genetic behavior of herpesviruses. On first glance, he seems as retiring and quiet as a New Zealander can be, but ask him about a herpesvirus - any of them - and you'll find yourself swimming in detail. He knows his stuff. But he was baffled last February when reporters rang his phone off the desk for three days straight. He knew what triggered the media flood - it was a paper he coauthored in Science announcing that a herpesvirus was responsible for the mysterious death of several zoo elephants. What befuddled him was that not one reporter had visited his lab in the preceding quarter-century. Judging from his CV, his work was solid and important. He had published papers by the ream and ran a fairly well-funded lab at a prestigious institution. But until he helped solve the elephant mystery, none of his work had qualified as newsworthy.

So what is newsworthy? Sadly, it's shifty and relative, changing day-by-day. If the world had gone to war on February 18, 1999, Gary Hayward would not have driven to the National Zoo to hold a TV press conference with a preening elephant as a backdrop (which, by the way, he did with aplomb). He would have been watching TV, listening to the reporters who had been interested in him the day before describe the first round of bombing. But in the world of science, there are a few ground rules. Media coverage in the science world is generally triggered by three events, two of them controllable or at least known: a publication, a meeting presentation, or an enterprising reporter looking you up. Most journal articles get relegated to the dusty stacks without catching the attention of reporters, but some - traditionally those in the big journals and increasingly those in second-tier pubs - provide the pulp that fills the pages.

And seeing as there's more and more health and science news these days, there are more and more reporters digging for a story - every single day, irrespective of grant deadlines and faculty meetings. That translates into increased interest in benchside basic research and preclinical drug development; it means that mouse models make headlines. Single gene discoveries, well, they're passé, but whole genome projects, now, those are still news. Look at Craig Venter, painted as a renegade scientist all over the joint for challenging the Human Genome Project authority by building what he calls a better sequencing machine.

This unquenchable thirst for science news means that when your story does break, it often breaks big, like the elephant story did, with a few days of insanity followed by eerie silence. It's not the pace you're used to, but it's how the news works. (This just in from my inner anchorman: The elephant story was bigger than most science and health news because it was a "cross-over," with both "the wonders of science" and "happy elephants" as themes. In total, then, the story was a "feel-good" of the type that editors "throw in the mix" to spruce up the daily "death and doom." No, it isn't pretty, it's daily journalism.)

You can handle this flood - which may be small (your basement), medium (the whole town), or large (find an ark) - but you must be prepared ahead of time. If a major journal is publishing your work, call your PR office immediately. They can prepare a news release and background information that will answer the basic questions for you, so you don't find yourself describing what a gene is 17 times in an hour. They will also triage calls and schedule interviews for you.

Then think of the main point - singular - that you want to make, and write it down. What, you say? You can't condense twenty years of sweat and assays into a pithy quote? No one can. So don't expect to convey your life's work in a 30-second-spot between sports and weather. It won't happen. But you will be able to announce what you've discovered, and if you're lucky, explain it a bit too. Save the life story for your autobiography. (And hire a ghostwriter while you're at it. God knows we need the work.)

Other handy tips: remember to be concise, be comfortable with being filmed, offer graphics, and avoid jargon.

After your news has run its course, you may find yourself in a post-celebrity letdown. It happens to the most self-effacing of scientists. Take Laura Richman, who was the veterinarian sleuth behind the elephant herpesvirus story. When the story hit, she bought a paper from a street hawker who looked at the front-page-gobbling picture of an attractive woman draped in a fashionable gray trunk and said, "Hey! You're the elephant woman!" She must have been high for days after that - who wouldn't be? Probably the nicest thing she'd heard in weeks. (You know what I mean, Laura.) But it's a hard, err, impossible, thing to sustain. So buy yourself a diet Sprite and mini-M & Ms, or whatever little pick-me-up you need, and take some you-time. Because you deserve it - millions have just seen your cheery mug explaining the latest exciting advance.

Then you'd better march back to the lab. You don't want to wait another 25 years before you make the front page again, do you?